[sugar] Education?

[John Manoogian III (jm3)]

this seems like an interesting theoretical programming environment.
would it be useful, for, say, writing a report? or a poem? or drawing a map?


On 3/12/07, Simon Forman <forman.simon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/12/07, John Manoogian III (jm3) <jm3 at jm3.net> wrote:
> > very interesting! you mention visual interactive components like a
> > "non-text-based GUI" and "3D environment" - are there screenshots or
> demos
> > of these?
> >
> > thanks,
> >
> > john
> >  www.jm3.net
> >
> >
> > On 3/12/07, Antoine van Gelder <hummingbird at hivemind.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> > > > On Mar 12, 2007, at 10:27 , Simon Forman wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> I've got something I think may be useful and relevant to this
> > discussion.
> > > >>
> > > >> I have been toying for several years with a system that I
> eventually
> > > >> named "xerblin" that provides a metaphor for computation that can
> span
> > > >> high level "Desktop" activities down to assembly language.  By that
> I
> > > >> mean that it puts grep and MOV into the same seamless framework.
> > >
> > >
> > > It's gorgeous.
> > >
> > >   - antoine
>
> Thanks guys, the warm reception for my little hobby project is very
> gratifying.  I'm a bit blown away.
>
> You can see a screen capture of the 2D direct-manipulation GUI at one
> of the older sites I made:
> http://www.geocities.com/rogue_pedro/xerblin/screenshot0.jpg
>
> This was the version I presented at CodeCon.  The green circles are
> ExecutableWords, the ovals are SequentialWords (at that time, they
> were not subclassed from list but rather implemented as binary trees
> both in themselves and in the GUI) while the pale yellow, light blue,
> and dark blue circles represent strings, ints, and floats
> respectively.
>
> These icon-ish "objects" could be moved around with the mouse, and
> they responded to mouse clicks in the same way as text in the
> TextViewers.  You could cut and paste them to and from the stack and
> build new commands out of existing ones by "pasting" words into
> SequentialWords.  You could also edit existing commands just with the
> mouse by pasting them into the GUI window and breaking them up and
> reassembling them.
>
> The code for this is still around somewhere, and it implements a port
> of Oberon's message passing system, but it's not terrific and it's out
> of sync with the current architecture so I've left it out for awhile.
>
> As for the 3D GUI, I transliterated the quaternion-based C++ math
> library from the back of "Physics for Game Developers" into python and
> used it to provide a simple coordinate transformation "pipeline" for a
> Tkinter Canvas subclass.  I got as far as having eight oval canvas
> items whirling around at the corners of a virtual cube but I never
> plugged those pseudo-3D items into the GUI objects I created for the
> 2D widget.
>
> You can probably see that this is just a quick and dirty way to get a
> kind of 3D environment.  I would have still had to make some
> decisions: open space or virtual ground, method of navigation in 3D
> space, method of manipulating objects in 3D space, would objects be
> anchored to things and if so what things, etc...
>
> One neat idea would be to have each GUI element that modeled a
> compound object control the coordinate transformation of it's kids'
> GUI elements.  That would allow for simple graceful representations of
> large and intricate trees just by applying a small rotation-and-scale
> recursively at each level, and it fits nicely with the Oberon
> component system.
>
> At the conference, I took a piece of C code like this:
>
> void g(int h) {
>     for (k=0; k <= 10; k++) {
>         h = 10;
>     }
> }
>
> and converted it into a functionally equivelent xerblin command, then
> I pasted it into the GUI frame and expanded it to show its full
> structure.  The resulting tree from even so small a fragment of C is a
> bit unweildy, as you might imagine, so the 3D environment could be a
> great improvement over the 2D canvas.  It will obviously require some
> fancy visualization to make this a viable way to introspect, say, grep
> down to the metal.
>
> Peace,
> ~Simon
>
> --
> "The history of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like
> that of an imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while
> the prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking
> but incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient
> and incongruous dreams, than like that of a man consciously awake to
> danger and opportunity."  --H. P. Wells, "A Short History of the
> World"
>



-- 
the blog is back: http://blog.jm3.net
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